BEATRICE'S POV
I blink.
And 187 days have passed.
I healed. Got back to work. Adrien apologized — formally, carefully, with the particular restraint of a man who understands he crossed a line he can never fully erase. He promised to maintain professional distance. He's kept that promise.
No lingering touches. No loaded silences. No "little terrorist" in meetings. Just the Vice Chairman and his advisor, separated by the appropriate distance and the memory of things neither of us mentions.
Angel stopped glaring at me like I'm a toxin in her ecosystem. We're not friends. We may never be. But the hostility has settled into something closer to professional coexistence.
New York is fast-paced. Wall Street is chaos. And chaos, it turns out, is an excellent anaesthetic.
Deals closed. Deals lost. I walk into meetings where the people who make and break industries sit across from me, and I hold my ground. The company apartment in the Upper East Side is mine now — decorated with my touch, my scent, pastel curtains that flutter when the wind comes through. Since I have a spare room, Lia decided it was perfectly reasonable to move in as my "tenant" — her rent paid exclusively in the form of cooking dinner every night.
I laugh. I work. I attend galas where I no longer feel like an imposter and networking dinners where I no longer need someone to introduce me.
Adrien is colder toward his family. In board meetings, the easy banter with the Chairman is gone — replaced by clipped exchanges and silences that carry weight. Something shifted between them. I don't poke at it. I do my job.
Lucian drops by every other week. Updates me on his rotating roster of girlfriends — a new one each time, none lasting longer than his attention span. Complains about Benedict dragging him into family obligations he'd rather avoid. Calls me Betty. I've stopped correcting him.
Everything has settled.
I have achieved the level of success I once thought impossible for a woman with my surname and my background. Corner office. Respected voice. A seat at tables I used to serve coffee in meetings.
And amid all of it — quietly, persistently, like a wound that scabbed over but never fully closed — there is the absence of a man with violet eyes who promised he'd come back tomorrow.
Tomorrow never came.
He didn't call the next day. Or the day after. I told myself a man man who runs a 300-year-old dynasty doesn't have the luxury of daily check-ins.
On the third day, I called him.
A woman answered.
"Theo is currently busy. Please call later."
Feminine. Soft. Familiar with him — familiar enough to answer his phone, familiar enough to call him Theo, familiar enough to speak on his behalf without hesitation.
I hung up.
Tears streamed down my face despite every rational argument I fed myself. It's for the best. He was infatuated. It was never going to last. Men like him don't settle for women like me. This is how it always ends.
I cried into my pillow until I passed out. Woke up with swollen eyes and a headache that felt like grief wearing a medical costume.
The next day, during a project briefing with Killian, I asked casually — so casually that the effort of sounding casual nearly cracked my voice:
"Is Theodore Schweitzer still in New York?"
Killian shook his head. Not suspicious. Why would he be? "Nah. Left for Zurich three days ago. That guy never stays far from Schweitzer Bank headquarters for long."
He left.
Three days. He was gone within three days of promising me tomorrow.
Back to Zurich. Back to where he belonged. Back to a world that didn't include a woman from a studio apartment who eats tacos and performs strength for a living.
Something in my chest didn't break. Breaking implies a clean fracture — something that can be set and healed. This was more like something essential being slowly extracted, leaving a hollow that filled with nothing.
That night — for the first time in five years — I went to a bar.
Still healing. Still raw. Lia came without being asked. Sophia pretended to be annoyed but showed up in heels and red lipstick because Sophia has never missed an opportunity to be seen.
The bar was loud. Dark red lighting. Bass heavy enough to feel in your teeth. I sat on a stool and let alcohol do what logic couldn't — drown the noise in my head.
For the first time in my life. The very first time. I had felt safe with a man. Genuinely safe. Not the safety of locked doors and financial independence — the safety of being seen without performing. Of crying without being judged. Of being held by someone whose arms felt like the answer to a question I didn't know I'd been asking my entire life.
The ice in my heart had been melting. I was waiting for spring. Waiting for someone. For the first time ever, I was waiting instead of doing all on my own.
And he left.
Alcohol burned my throat. Tears mixed with cheap whiskey on my cheeks. Lia and Sophia were on the dance floor — laughing, spinning, alive in the way people are when they haven't just been hollowed out. I sat on my stool staring into the same dark I'd spent years trying to climb out of.
I had reached for Theodore Schweitzer's hand.
And he'd let go.
I returned to myself. The way I always do.
Hid the pain. Buried the fury. Let the slow numbness spread through my body like anaesthetic — dulling the sharp edges, making everything survivable if not bearable.
I smiled. Laughed. Stayed sharp. The performance of Beatrice Kenz resumed without intermission.
Of course this was going to happen. I knew it from the beginning. Men like Theodore don't settle for women like me. The doorstep flowers. The bus declaration. The soup, the kneeling, the forehead kisses, the "I won't touch you until you love me" — all of it was the courtship of a man who was fascinated by something novel. And novelty expires.
The woman on the phone turned out to be Isabelle Bernard. Daughter of a French conglomerate family. Sophia mentioned it weeks later — casually, the way she mentions everything, unaware that each word was a nail driven into wood.
"Theodore and Isabelle have always been close. Their mothers had some connection — I think Mrs. Bernard is practically a mother figure to him. And Isabelle has been around him since they were children. She's two years younger. Gorgeous, obviously. There have always been rumors."
Sophia talked about it the way people discuss weather. Factual, breezy, irrelevant.
She had no idea how much of me died in that conversation.
A mother figure. A woman who's been in his life since childhood. A connection deeper than anything I could build in a handful of days.
Of course. Of course there was someone before me, beside me, after me — someone who fit into his world without needing to be explained or defended or justified.
I was just a plaything. An interesting detour on the road back to the life he was always going to return to.
And the same pattern repeated. The one tattooed into my life like a scar I can't cover: whenever I believe someone might stay — whenever I let my guard down, let myself be real, let the walls crack enough for light to enter — I get used and discarded. Every single time.
Wine cooled in my glass. Every memory I'd thought precious — the soup, the rain, the balcony, "psychí mou" whispered against my forehead — turned to ash. Meaningless. Performance from a man who was better at it than I'd given him credit for.
Like a fool. A desperate, miserable fool. I let myself be swayed. I cried in his arms. I held him. I kissed him. I almost —
The ache in my chest doubles when the memory of that afternoon returns. The second button. His hands stopping. His voice saying "I won't touch you until you love me."
I thought it was devotion. Turns out it was an exit strategy. He never intended to get involved deeply enough that leaving would cost him something.
187 days. The exact duration of the promise he made on a city bus — six months of pursuit until I agreed to marry him.
The six months expired.
And so did Theodore Schweitzer.
Lia asks what happened between us. I deflect with a joke that comes out flatter than intended.
"Just a phase. Started fast. Ended faster."
A phase that I almost — almost — believed it was permanent. But I never say that to anyone.
Sunset fills my office with amber light. Another call from Adrien. Another file from Angel. Another deal requiring my attention. The machinery of my career turns without pause, indifferent to the woman operating it.
I am not waiting for him.
Or maybe I am. Maybe I'm just too tired of being abandoned to know the difference between moving forward and standing still.
Every time I let myself be real with someone, they leave. And the leaving gets quieter each time — less dramatic, less violent, just a slow withdrawal that leaves me holding air where a person used to be.
I don't know what I feel.
Hatred? Rage? Ache? Longing? Some nameless thing that contains all four and resolves into none of them?
A knock on my door.
Adrien walks in. Jacket on. "Let's go. We have a meeting with congressional insiders. You know the drill. Talk and get them feel like its spring when its storm awaiting."
I nod. Stand. Adjust my skirt.
And a soft, wounded voice speaks in the back of my mind — the voice I've been trying to silence for 187 days:
You shouldn't have made a promise you weren't going to keep, Theodore.
You shouldn't have let me break in your arms, protect me, feed me, treat me with a tenderness I didn't know was possible.
You shouldn't have kneeled.
You shouldn't have whispered "psychí mou" against my forehead like it meant something eternal.
And then just leave, Taking half of my heart with you.
I follow Adrien out the door. Angel falls into step beside us. The elevator descends. The lobby gleams. Manhattan is same outside.
This is what I am.
Strong. Independent. Always finding my way forward.
Even as I bleed where nobody can see.
Because nobody can handle this side of me... Not even my best friend who stayed through me at my best and worst..
And with count five, I get into the role of Advisor of Aurelièn, a woman whose purpose is to ensure his position is strong and correct...
Beatrice Kanz never had the luxury to grief for the love she fell for only to tossed outside.